Talking Back

by Andrea Mitchell

  I rode the bus down the New Jersey Turnpike to Camden and arrived at the plant at five-thirty p.m., but the NBC Winnebago was nowhere to be found. Frantically, I ran up and down the street, past local and network satellite trucks, but couldn’t find our tape editor or Carroll Ann—or, of course, all the videotape we’d shot in New York for that evening’s broadcast. How could they have gotten lost between New York City and Camden? It never occurred to me: they’d run out of gas.

  In desperation, I found the local NBC truck that was coordinating live shots for the nearby Philadelphia NBC affiliate, KYW, my alma mater. They didn’t have any of the New York rally pictures, but they could at least feed my voice to New York. So my first night’s story of the general election campaign was a mess—a combination of whatever pictures Carroll Ann could throw together when she finally did arrive in Camden, augmented by the local NBC station’s coverage and a hurried narration recorded on the street—proving once again that political coverage was sometimes held hostage to more than the whims of high technology and campaign schedules. Today, the networks pool much of their coverage and feed the raw tape back to Washington or New York in bulk, so that it can be slickly edited into final form. But in those days, we were still doing it ourselves, from wherever we were on the road.

  As we struggled to get on the air for Nightly News, the Clinton bus moved on. A second NBC team covered the next few stops, while we leapfrogged ahead to York, Pennsylvania, where the campaign was going to spend the night. The moment we arrived in York, at one a.m., but still ahead of the campaign entourage, I sensed that something extraordinary was happening in American politics. The streets were filled with people in lawn chairs, with candles and flashlights, waiting for the Clinton bus to arrive. This was hardly a Democratic stronghold. In fact, the city was in a Republican area of Pennsylvania.

  Had something about this new team captured the imagination of Middle America, or was it just that the circus was coming to town? I didn’t know, but for whatever reason, the bus trip was already becoming an iconic event. The crowds cheered our Winnebago, thinking we were the candidates. Naturally, we waved back. When Clinton arrived at two o’clock in the morning, despite the hour, there were thousands of people waiting up for him. He and Gore rewarded them with impromptu speeches, and for another hour, tried to shake every hand in sight.

  For weeks, we traveled the back roads of America, through Pennsylvania and Ohio and then on to the Midwest, crisscrossing the Mississippi River and rolling into St. Louis for an outdoor rally big enough to fill Busch Stadium on one of the hottest days of the year. Along the way, the candidate made plenty of promises. As I reported on July 20 from Kentucky, Clinton hadn’t been specific about how he’d pay for all his new programs, “but name a problem—he has a program to fix it.” There would be plenty of time for budget math later.

  The next day, my colleague, White House correspondent John Cochran, reported on the president’s own budget difficulties—a projected $399 billion dollar deficit. As John put it: “Even the Republican chairman of the Federal Reserve said today, ‘Nothing is more important than cutting the deficit.’” Then he showed Alan warning Congress in his semiannual testimony that the deficit was a “corrosive force,” damaging the economy. After such a long stretch on the road, I didn’t care what Alan was saying—I was just glad to catch a glimpse of him on television.

  On that first thousand-mile trek of the Clinton campaign, the candidate would often stop the bus if he saw ten people at a crossroads. The man loved campaigning so much he would have gone house to house if it meant he could deliver his stump speech. Each time he stopped the lead bus, we had to jump off and run alongside to catch up and cover whatever he was saying to the gathered crowd. One night in Iowa, Clinton stopped the cavalcade so many times—including once for some drunks leaving a bar at closing time—that one of the Secret Service men on the press bus said, “If he stops one more time, and we don’t get some sleep, I’m going to become a threat to his safety.”

  To Clinton, schedules were irrelevant. For a rally organized by Senator Tom Harkin at a county fair somewhere in Iowa, the advance teams had set up bales of hay so that Clinton could give his speech against a scenic backdrop, a stage set made for television. But the candidate stopped so many times along the way that by the time we got to the fair, the sun had set. Still, at least a thousand people were waiting, standing shoulder to shoulder, in the dark. It didn’t make great pictures for television news, but it was a rousing campaign event. Bill Clinton was definitely connecting with the voters.

  On another night, after pulling into a motel parking lot around two o’clock in the morning, Clinton insisted on giving his entire campaign speech to whoever was still awake. Finally Al Gore just shrugged and went inside to get some sleep. Usually when we arrived somewhere in the middle of the night, my work was just beginning. I had to write a script and get up for the Today show, well before dawn. It was brutal.

  The campaign became a blur of sleepless nights and endless Bill Clinton speeches. Yet it was exciting, because he was capturing something new, a yearning for generational change—and people were responding to the energy, the youth of the Clinton-Gore team. In comparison to George Herbert Walker Bush, these were very young men. I began to realize that there was a new dynamic, and that Clinton was selling himself, successfully, as an agent of change. No matter how much we focused on the candidates’ policies, people were comparing their styles, and Bush was coming up short.

  The contrast became apparent during a White House press conference in June 1992, when a reporter asked Bush why he wanted to be reelected.

  The president said, “That’s what Barbara was asking me a few minutes ago.” What was his answer to his wife?

  “I’d say, hey, I want to continue this job to help this country…. It’s worth finishing the job. Nobody likes the primary process.” It was hardly a sweeping vision for a second term. There was no energy to his self-presentation; he seemed like a spent force. If he had great ideas for the next four years, he didn’t project them. Despite his popularity after the first Gulf War, Bush seemed vulnerable.

  As we went through the fall campaign, the Clinton-Gore team seemed to click with their theme song, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow).” The first baby boomer candidates for president and vice president were outfoxing Bush. And despite a serious effort by Jim Baker to talk Bush into dumping Quayle in favor of a candidate who could represent “change,” Bush, according to one advisor, was “reluctant to pull the trigger.”

  The contrast between the optimism and hope Clinton had projected at his convention and the weariness Bush was conveying became even more pronounced after the Republicans gathered a month later in Houston. Despite a rousing performance by Ronald Reagan, there was nothing moderate about the party’s platform, or the opening night speech by Pat Buchanan, who climbed on board with an attack on Bill Clinton’s patriotism, whipping up the crowd with the cry that Clinton was “not the kind of change we can abide in a nation that we still call God’s country.”

  On the floor, moderates like Kansas senator Nancy Kassebaum were dismayed at other speakers like Marilyn Quayle, who was just as harsh as Buchanan. Prominent Republican women, one by one, took me aside, questioning what was happening to their party. It was a warning sign of what was to come on Election Day: moderates and independents, particularly women, would abandon Bush in droves. Campaign organizers were blamed for letting Buchanan speak in prime time. I was told that the candidate’s son, George W. Bush, held Secretary of State Jim Baker accountable for resisting appeals to quit his cherished cabinet post before the convention and take control of the campaign.

  The mood in Houston that August was ugly, inside the hall and out. One day a fight almost broke out at a downtown restaurant when one hundred Young Republicans besieged Democrats, brought to Houston by party chairman Ron Brown to present opposition “spin.” The Young Republican activists pounded on the windows and walls as Brown tried to show re
porters new campaign ads. They were too angry to interview, alternately chanting “Libs go home” and “Millie, not Hillie,” a juvenile comparison of the president’s dog to Bill Clinton’s wife. Bush gave a strong speech, attacking Clinton and the Democratically controlled Congress, but the impression the country had was that Buchanan, not Bush, was the face of the Republican Party.

  The morning after Bush was nominated, my colleague Maria Shriver offered to give me a lift to Burbank, California, so that I could accept an invitation from Jay Leno to appear on The Tonight Show. My producer, Susan Lasalla, and I showed up at the airport not knowing what to expect. It was quite a scene as Maria, her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and their children welcomed us to their gleaming private jet.

  As the children played games, Arnold asked me what jokes I had prepared for Leno. Jokes? All I knew was the latest scuttlebutt about Jim Baker and Pat Buchanan. Although I was pretty hopeless, Arnold and Maria spent the rest of the flight coaching me for my Tonight Show debut. Much to my relief, when I walked out on the set and was seated on that famous couch, all Jay wanted to ask about was politics. That I could handle.

  By October, the campaign had gotten mean. Ross Perot had jumped back into the race, declaring that his decision to drop out in July had been a mistake. (He would spend more than $60 million, garner 19 percent of the vote, and fail to win a single state. As Tom Brokaw said on election night, the Texas billionaire seemed to enjoy every dime he spent.) Perhaps it’s because most of his support came from voters who would otherwise have supported Bush, with whom Perot had had a grudge match dating back to those differences over how aggressively to keep searching for Vietnam War MIAs.

  Knowing Perot was draining votes from him, Bush started lashing out at Clinton in frustration. On October 3, he mocked Clinton’s claim not to have inhaled marijuana: “This guy couldn’t remember in detail that he didn’t inhale twenty years ago, and he can’t remember what came out of his mouth twenty minutes ago.” Four days later, the president questioned Clinton’s patriotism because of a trip Clinton had made while in college to the former Soviet Union and his antiwar activities while a student at Oxford in 1969. “To go to a foreign country and demonstrate against your own country when your sons and daughters are dying halfway around the world, I’m sorry, I just don’t like it,” Bush said. “I think it’s wrong.” The themes seem remarkably similar to the attacks on John Kerry’s antiwar activities in the 2004 campaign. At the same time, Clinton was excoriating the president for both his economic and foreign policies.

  Though Clinton was already ahead, as in 2004, the debates were critical. Of the three debates, the most lopsided took place in Richmond on October 15. Clinton was once again struggling with chronic laryngitis; in fact, he had Hillary stand in for him at one of his campaign rallies. But the format greatly favored Clinton’s style of campaigning. The candidates sat on stools, in a town hall meeting setting. When Clinton reached out and walked over to a young woman who had asked a question about people who were unemployed, he instantly communicated his empathy to the larger audience at home. George Bush, not realizing he was on camera, checked his watch to see how much time he had left to frame his answers. The message sent to the voters: the president was bored, and would have preferred to be having his teeth drilled rather than face that live audience.

  On October 30, 1992, we started out in Newark on our way to Pittsburgh. It was my forty-sixth birthday, making me one of the oldest reporters in the press corps. In fact, the candidate was one of the few other baby boomers on the plane. At times, on a late flight, we would talk about Vietnam or other events from the sixties, and I’d feel very separate from the rest. They had different cultural icons, different musical tastes. What did they know of George McGovern, or the ’68 riots?

  As I arrived on this birthday to board the campaign plane for a flight to Pittsburgh, suddenly a guy in a purple jumpsuit leaped out, shaking a guitar. This unlikely apparition was in fact an Elvis impersonator, hired by one of the producers as a joke on me in a campaign where the candidate was often referred to as Elvis (one of his musical heroes). Clinton came down the steps to watch, looking politely amused, although the “Elvis” they’d hired could barely sing.

  That day was also memorable because of a later development that George Herbert Walker Bush still believes—along with Alan’s interest rate increases—caused him to lose the election. The special counsel investigating Iran-Contra, Lawrence Walsh, won a new indictment from a grand jury against Reagan defense secretary Caspar Weinberger. Most important, in a side note, the indictment resurrected questions about George Bush’s role, suggesting that Reagan’s vice president may have known more about the arms-for-hostages deal than he’d admitted. Suddenly, the Reagan administration’s worst scandal was back in the news, and along with it questions about whether Bush had taken part in the cover-up. Bush aides later told me they had been gaining a point a day in their rolling tracking polls. When the Weinberger indictment hit, their progress slammed to a halt. To this day, the Bushes consider that indictment a Democratic dirty trick, even though Walsh was, nominally, a Republican.

  At least the president was flying on Air Force One. How we, or Clinton, survived to reach Election Day is beyond me. Much as I love being on the road, campaigns involve grueling bus trips, terrible press charter flights, no sleep, a diet of fast food, candy, coffee and doughnuts, and rarely, if ever, a hot meal. Even getting from point A to point B is a challenge. One night in Jackson, Mississippi, I had to stay behind to do Nightly News and rejoin the campaign, which had flown on to Toledo, Ohio. When we needed to catch up, NBC had been chartering us by jet. But that night, when I got to the airport in Jackson, our assignment desk had ordered a single-engine, small-propeller plane. It resembled something that could have flown combat missions in World War II. The pilot looked as though he hadn’t reached puberty.

  I climbed in, my fear of flying outweighed by the need to get to Toledo and start preparing for the next morning’s Today show. The boy pilot tried to start the engine—and nothing happened. He tried again, to no effect. Finally, he got jumper cables, hot-wired the plane to get it started, and hopped in. It was only after we’d started rolling down the runway that I noticed the duct tape holding the window in place.

  On the last day, heading out from a Philadelphia diner, Clinton embarked on a final nine-state, cross-country swing to hammer home the image of a younger candidate, as he put it, a “change” agent. Brimming with confidence from polls showing him eight points ahead, he still wanted to outperform Bush in a final burst of energy.

  As he crossed the country, each Clinton-Gore rally was more enthusiastic than the last, with thousands of people at every airport shouting, “One more day, one more day.” The air caravan, which by then had grown to three planes, followed the sun west before doubling back to Arkansas: forty-one hundred miles from Philadelphia to Democratic strongholds in Cleveland, Detroit, and St. Louis; then on to Paducah, Kentucky; McAllen and Fort Worth, Texas; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Denver, Colorado. Finally, home to Little Rock. By then, we practically had “the speech” memorized.

  In stark contrast, there is a still photo from the president’s final train trip before the election that captures the mood of the Republican campaign: Bush’s political alter ego, Jim Baker, is sitting in a trench coat, staring ahead glumly. It was taken the day Baker was told that the campaign’s own polls showed they could not win. At every stop on his final day, the president said that Saddam Hussein planned to hold a victory party if Clinton won. The campaign rhetoric, from both sides, had become so mean that no one found Bush’s comment at all remarkable.

  On election eve, Ross Perot bought two hours of network television time to repeat his half-hour attack program entitled, “Chicken Feathers, Deep Voodoo, and the American Dream.” He did have a way with words.

  Election night was a sparkling fall evening, unusually cold for Little Rock. Trapped in a huge crowd at the victory rally, I ducked under the press barriers at the
Old State House and worked my way to the stage to see if I could get a comment from Clinton or Gore for our broadcast. When the two families finally came out to declare victory, Clinton arm in arm with Hillary and Chelsea, the crowd erupted. Weary campaign workers were hugging and kissing each other. The entire state of Arkansas must have been crowded into the victory celebration. I was hanging on to the edge of the stage when Gore actually leaned down to me; to my mortification, I couldn’t think of a relevant question. As I recall, I shouted something dumb, like, “How do you feel?” The newly elected vice president looked at me as though I’d lost my mind. Luckily, the camera never veered my way.

  Clinton and Gore had won, but my future was up in the air. I had never asked what the network planned for me should the Democrats reclaim the White House. For one thing, my friend John Cochran was still the White House correspondent, and I didn’t want to undercut him. For another, I was superstitious. I’d been down this road too many times. But one morning Tim Russert, our bureau chief, reached me in my Little Rock hotel room and said, “I’ve got good news and bad news. You are going to be chief White House correspondent.”

  It was the job I’d always wanted. What was the bad news? After four years, I was losing my coveted slot as political analyst for the Today show. I’d been on a weekly panel to talk politics, first with David Broder and Jack Germond, then with Al Hunt and Russert. Tim told me, “We can’t have you do political analysis because it would undercut your credibility at the White House.” In those days, the boundaries between straight reporting and analysis were hard and fast.